


Leg It

by triggernometry



Series: Slice of Afterlife [5]
Category: Flight Rising
Genre: Ashspine Widow (Flight Rising), F/M, Giant Spiders, Pearlcatcher (Flight Rising), Ridgeback (Flight Rising)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 10:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16852132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triggernometry/pseuds/triggernometry
Summary: The One Time Klagohaj nods off, his kid brings back a giant spider for a pet. Klagohaj must reconcile being a non-terrible parent with how absolutely awful spiders are.





	Leg It

 It's one of the rare occasions that Klagohaj is actually asleep. He doesn't technically _need_ to sleep, as far as he can tell; he just gets more sluggish on occasion, nods off for a few hours or so in dreamless oblivion, and wakes up feeling whatever the facsimile of _better_ is for a dead dragon.

Booth has explained to him on more than one occasion that this is how being tired works for everyone, but Klagohaj maintains that it feels different now, somehow.

It's midday when he closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the shift of the light filtering through the miasma tells him it's more or less still midday, just later. He does not, however, feel particularly arrested by timekeeping at the moment of waking – rather, he's extremely focused on the large, spiky, hairy leg currently patting him gently on the cheek.

“Whuh _thegoodgoddamnhell,_ ” is all he manages before rocketing up into a standing position faster than a rattler with its tail on fire.

The large, spiky, hairy leg belongs to a large, spiky, hairy spider roughly the colour of deep Plague soil and currently clicking its barbed mandibles at him in what he assumes is code for _you look delicious._

Large spiders aren't unheard-of in Klagohaj's world. He's seen more than a few in his day – one of which was even metal, and quick enough to snip his hand clean off before he kicked every last glowing eye out of its stupid head. That was how he learned he could just pop body parts back on and have them knit back together with the rest of him – a quality which would _not_ apply to his head, Booth had told him immediately after he shared his discovery.

So it's not as if he doesn't know from large spiders. He just doesn't _like_ them.

Klagohaj screams.

“Good, you're up.” Booth's voice behind him. “Give me a hand, would you?”

He turns his head just enough to look at her. Booth's currently trying to drag the weapons trunk from the scrap-tent. It's full of Booth's spoils of her war on the local road agent population: revolvers of nearly every description, more than a handful of rifles, a blunderbuss so broken and dangerous Booth has used it to bait more than a few of the more dangerous targets into blowing their own arms off, and more ammunition than Booth ever seems to find the need for. She tends to pull it out – or rather, ask Klagohaj to pull it out – and count the contents before a job, but Klagohaj's currently too distracted to think about that.

Beside the scrap-tent sits Lil Cuss, neck-deep in an overripe cherry roughly as big as he is and which Klagohaj had done something stupid and spine-threatening to pick for him while out scavenging. It'd been worth it just to see the child's eyes light up with curious delight. Watching him take a bite out of the first one? _Definitely_ worth it.

“Uh,” Klagohaj says. He points to the monstrosity in front of him.

Booth cranes her neck to look beyond him. “Oh, that,” she says, in a tone of voice that is not nearly appropriate for how awful the current situation is. “Lil Cuss brought that home while you were asleep. I think he intends to keep it.”  
  
Klagohaj is too horrified even to revel in the victory of hearing Booth use the nickname that casually.

“Close my eyes for a minute an’ the world goddamn flips right over,” Klagohaj mutters _._ A pause. “Wait, _keep_ it? _This?”_ He turns to look at the nightmare spider again to make sure he and Booth are looking at and talking about the same thing. “Jus', uh, so we're clear – uh, _our_ son brought home a monster spider straight outta nightmares an' is gonna _keep it_? An’ you’re just ... fine with that?”

“Yes. You gonna help or not?”

Klagohaj backs away from the monster spider straight from nightmares slowly. He feels safer standing closer to Booth, even if she's clearly got heatstroke and doesn’t know it yet. He grabs the other handle of the trunk and helps her carry it off to one side of the stone and driftwood circle.

“Good,” she says, popping the latch on the trunk and opening it.

“Booth,” Klagohaj says.

“It's an ashspine widow,” she says, drawing a roll of canvas from the trunk and spreading it out on the ground before her. She crouches in front of it and begins rummaging through the trunk. “Venom's good for spellcraft, and keeping gardens free of pests. Usually aggressive, but the boy carried it like a hainu pup without any trouble.” A pause. “Well -- it’s about as big as he is, so. A little trouble.”  
  
“Booth.”  
  
“Not sure how it got this far north,” Booth continues. She takes the revolvers out first, lining them up trigger-to-barrel on the canvas. “My guess is, a shipping crate got lost somewhere and it washed up on the Shores.”  
  
“Booth.”  
  
“The boy taught it to fetch.” This said with a faint note of pride in her voice.  
  
Lil Cuss looks up as if on cue, his face a mess of cherry flesh and juice. “Fleh,” he says, face splitting into a huge smile. What teeth have grown in now are stained red. 

Klagohaj lowers his voice. He leans closer to her conspiratorially. “We can't _keep_ it, Booth.”  
  
“Sure we can. It'll feed itself.”  
  
“On _what?_ My face?”  
  
“Well, they _do_ eat carrion on occasion.”  
  
“Booth!”

She gives him a level stare. “It's not going to eat you, Haj. The boy made it docile somehow. I wouldn’t let him have it if I hadn’t seen it myself.”  
  
Klagohaj sighs heavily, feeling himself rapidly losing this argument. He looks from the juice-soaked face of the child to the widow, which, over the course of their discussion, has tippy-toed around him and come to rest at Lil Cuss’ side. The child gives a delighted bark of laughter and pets the widow on the head, leaving a smear of cherry juice just behind its cluster of red eyes.

Despite its terrible appearance, the widow _does_ seem pretty docile. It’s also not actually made a move to leap on any part of Klagohaj – the disturbing wake-up call of an arachnid leg petting his cheek notwithstanding – which is usually his first criterion for whether something is dangerous or not. 

“Y'think it's an eye thing?”

“Eye thing,” Booth repeats flatly. The canvas in front of her is now mostly hidden under the contents of the weapons trunk. Klagohaj's briefly distracted by the gleam of a handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

“The, uh, spider's got a buncha eyes. The wanderer had a buncha eyes. _He's_ got a buncha eyes. Y'think they got a, uh, a what's it called? Like a cult but nice?”  
  
“A club,” Booth says. She opens a box of ammunition, does a silent count, closes it again and sets it aside.

Klagohaj snaps his fingers. “That's it. Y'think they got a club?”  
  
“No, I do not think they have a club _._ ”  
  
“Then what d'you suppose it is?”  
  
Booth sighs. She opens another box, scoffs at the five bullets it contains, and sets it aside. She looks at Lil Cuss and then at the ashspine widow and then at Klagohaj.

“Well.” She shrugs. “Every Plague dragon is immune to one thing or another. Maybe the boy's immune to danger.” Booth snorts, goes back to sorting ammunition.

Klagohaj looks back at the hatchling, eyebrows raised. “What, y'think so?”  
  
“No. And you are not allowed to test the idea either way,” Booth says, fixing him with a level stare.

Klagohaj holds his hands up and gives her the same butter-couldn't-melt smile he's given to every officer of the law he's ever met in either of his lives. “Oh, no, no,” he says. “'Course not.” 


End file.
